One of the most highly anticipated events for Bitcoin and its community of miners, investors, and enthusiasts occurred on April 19th, 2024. The Bitcoin halving, a automatic process hardwired into the protocol that reduces the block reward for miners by 50% every 210,000 blocks mined (roughly every 4 years), took place for the fourth time in Bitcoin’s history.
As described by Bitcoin’s mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto in the early days,
“Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It’ll be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years.”
This systematic halvings help complete the controlled distribution of Bitcoin’s capped 21 million coin supply without flooding the market.
The latest halving saw the block reward cut from 6.25 BTC per block to just 3.125 BTC. Remarkably, for the 840,000th block which triggered the halving, miners paid over 37 BTC in fees to have their transactions included, making it one of Bitcoin’s most expensive blocks ever according to mempool.space data. It was mined by ViaBTC, currently one of the largest mining pools.
A Key Driver of Bitcoin’s Scarcity
The halving events are a crucial part of Bitcoin’s value proposition as a scarce digital asset. By sharply reducing the new supply of bitcoin entering circulation, it creates a potential supply squeeze relative to demand. This dynamic is amplified by the recent launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs by investment giants like BlackRock, Fidelity and others, which are scooping up available BTC.
For long-time Bitcoin supporters like Cory Klippsten, CEO of Swan Bitcoin, the halving represents an important milestone reinforcing Bitcoin’s core principles.
“For me the halving is about marking the entrance of Bitcoin into its fifth epoch. The long duration of these four year periods between halvings are a great representation of the low time preference required to survive and thrive in Bitcoin both as an individual and as a company.”
History as a Guide
If past is prologue, the impact of this latest halving on Bitcoin’s price could be significant based on previous halving cycles. After the first halving in 2012, Bitcoin’s price increased over 10x from around $12 to $1040 within a year. The second halving in 2016 preceded Bitcoin’s rise to $20,000 in 2017.
Beyond the price impact, the halving also serves to reaffirm the core principles underpinning Bitcoin’s monetary policy and economic design. It proves the protocol is executing as designed through its decentralized consensus. The supply squeeze resulting from the new issuance cut enhances Bitcoin’s scarcity and deflationary properties, strengthening its parallels to digital gold.
For miners, it incentivizes greater operational and energy efficiency to maintain profitability with the lower block rewards. Mining operations that fail to continually optimize could be forced out, improving the health of Bitcoin’s distributed mining network over time.
While no one can predict Bitcoin’s price movements with certainty, this latest historic halving will undoubtedly be a major catalyst shaping its markets, narratives, and evolution over the next four years until the next halving cycle in 2028.
